Olympos, Dan Simmons
Jul. 6th, 2005 07:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellarienUmm. Wow. I stayed up much too late last night to finish this. It isn't, properly speaking, a novel in itself; it's the second half of the story started in Ilium. I've been looking forward to it since before it was even listed on Amazon (and I wasn't the only one, judging by the fact that 'Simmons Olympos' was a suggested search months before there was anything for it to find), and I wasn't disappointed. Even on its own, it's probably one of the two or three best books I've read all year. Taken together, the two books make up a dazzling achievement that deserves to become a classic.
It isn't perfect, of course.
This story has everything except possibly the kitchen sink; Greek myth and poetry, bleeding-edge physics, Shakespeare and Proust, violence and horror, comedy and tragedy and breathtaking spectacle. (I'm not the best reader to spot humour -- it never occurred to me that Stephenson's The Confusion was funny, for example, until someone else mentioned it -- but there were definitely moments in Olympos that made me smile, so I suspect some people would find it laugh-out-loud funny in parts.) Whole sections are done in what looks like brilliant pastiche of Homer (in an old, probably out-of-copyright translation) or Shakespeare's Tempest. Occasionally the literariness gets out of hand, as the story grinds to a halt for a discussion of Proust, but that doesn't happen too often. I'd worried a little about how all this was going to be sustained after the Trojan elements of the story broke so spectacularly away from Homer at the end of Ilium, but with the help of some other classical authors the characters stay in character and the Trojan story eventually if temporarily gets back on track.
One flaw, to my mind, but a fairly small one, is the way that chunks of the backstory turn out to be based on a rather crude extrapolation of a particular view of current events, and there's one throwaway line that appears to be a dead giveaway of the author's political leanings. I'm also not sure, after one reading of each book with a year or more between, that there aren't some fairly large holes in the backstory as finally revealed. Classical purists might be annoyed by what Simmons finally does to the ending of the story of Troy and its warring people and gods, too. On the whole, though, the twists and turns of the story come to a satisfying conclusion, and the pyrotechnics are compelling enough to overwhelm the imperfections.
It isn't perfect, of course.
This story has everything except possibly the kitchen sink; Greek myth and poetry, bleeding-edge physics, Shakespeare and Proust, violence and horror, comedy and tragedy and breathtaking spectacle. (I'm not the best reader to spot humour -- it never occurred to me that Stephenson's The Confusion was funny, for example, until someone else mentioned it -- but there were definitely moments in Olympos that made me smile, so I suspect some people would find it laugh-out-loud funny in parts.) Whole sections are done in what looks like brilliant pastiche of Homer (in an old, probably out-of-copyright translation) or Shakespeare's Tempest. Occasionally the literariness gets out of hand, as the story grinds to a halt for a discussion of Proust, but that doesn't happen too often. I'd worried a little about how all this was going to be sustained after the Trojan elements of the story broke so spectacularly away from Homer at the end of Ilium, but with the help of some other classical authors the characters stay in character and the Trojan story eventually if temporarily gets back on track.
One flaw, to my mind, but a fairly small one, is the way that chunks of the backstory turn out to be based on a rather crude extrapolation of a particular view of current events, and there's one throwaway line that appears to be a dead giveaway of the author's political leanings. I'm also not sure, after one reading of each book with a year or more between, that there aren't some fairly large holes in the backstory as finally revealed. Classical purists might be annoyed by what Simmons finally does to the ending of the story of Troy and its warring people and gods, too. On the whole, though, the twists and turns of the story come to a satisfying conclusion, and the pyrotechnics are compelling enough to overwhelm the imperfections.